What does your organisation’s finance department training calendar look like for the coming year?

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What does your organisation’s finance department training calendar look like for the coming year?

04 September 2018

People represent a crucial cog in an organisations operation machine, and like any other piece of equipment you need to continuously invest and provide resource to them to ensure you are getting the best out of them.

For those people working within an organisations finance team, staying abreast of current updates in this unprecedented period of change has moved from being a “nice to have” to “an absolute necessity”.

For members of the Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand, you will be all too aware of your ongoing annual Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements, and that the new “CPD year” has just recently begun on 1 July.

This makes now a great time for organisations to sit back and assess what the training calendar for their finance teams looks like, and whether there are gaps to be filled.

What does successful training look like?

The comments we typically hear include: “Training is boring”, and “It’s the same stuff each year”.

We definitely understand these two points, being in a position where we both provide training as well as receive training ourselves, we are well aware of the diversity in training quality at each opposite end of the spectrum.

As we see it, training has shifted from being solely an education endeavour, to a more collaborative, sharing of ideas and experiences. While you will never be able to fully move away from the education piece (what is training if you are not learning new things) this does not mean that it needs to be overbearing to extent that its effectiveness becomes lost.

Also, while there is a place for adopting and incorporating new technologies (such as eTraining) in our experience the tangible value in training comes people interacting and engaging with one another – where the collaboration and sharing of ideas can be fostered.

That is how we are biologically hardwired as a species, and the reason why social interaction is the cornerstone of our day to day existence.

What training topics are currently most relevant?

Well, where do we start?

There is presently significant change across the board which finance teams will need to be navigating, and it very much is the age old conundrum of “You don’t know what you don’t know”.

Examples of areas we are seeing organisations reach out for training include:

With respect to point (a) above, this has become an urgent priority for-profit organisations that have an external audit requirement. This is because the impact of new accounting standards needs to be documented, supported, and provided as part of audit evidence to be submitted for the year of adoption.

Therefore a working knowledge of the changes these standards introduce is vital.

Where can BDO step in and assist

Compiling and delivering training is one of the many strings to our bow.

We have a strong mix of both professional services and industry experts, which ensures our trainings are not only focused on the “technical details”, but rather incorporate “real world” experiences and scenarios.

We currently work with a number of organisations providing both scheduled annual training programs, as well as ad-hoc sessions as and when required.

We work with you to make sure the material that is delivered is customised to your particular organisation and aimed at the appropriate level with respect to the intended attendees – i.e. you are not going to get the same “cookie cutter” training than all other organisations we present to receive.

Further details of the training and workshop services we provide can be found here.

We look forward to hearing from you to discuss how we might assist your organisation with your training needs.